Today is the second anniversary of October 7. I want to share some personal reflections about that day and the past two years.

October 7 was, for me, a lightning bolt. If you’ve been struck by lightning you aren’t the same person the day after as you were the day before. The October 8 Ted Folkman was, in a way, a different person than the October 6 Ted Folkman. I’d been worried about the rise in antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment for years. But I’d also always supported the blueprint for peace in the region: in return for recognition of Israel as the Jewish state, the Palestinians would have their own state in the West Bank and Gaza: “land for peace.” I’d supported the two-state solution through the election of Hamas to rule Gaza. I’d supported the two-state solution through thick and thin: Hamas misrule, radicalization of the Palestinians, including in UN-supported schools, the many rounds of violence in the years leading up to 10/7, and in particular, the massive rocket barrages of 2021. October 7 showed the world that Hamas has no intention, ever, of accepting a Jewish state, and that as it has done for decades, it intends to commit mass atrocities in order to achieve its aims. And October 8 showed the world that many or most Palestinians, and many of their supporters in the West, did not just understand or sympathize with the October 7 massacre, but actively supported it. With the chants of “there is only one solution, intifada revolution!” “Zionism is racism!” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” echoing in the streets of North American and European cities and on our campuses, it has become clear that the long vacation from history diaspora Jewry has enjoyed is over. Zionism is racism, the Jews are the oppressors in Palestine and around the world, European colonizers don’t belong in Palestine and need to return to where they came from, like Poland (though the protestors never seem to say, like Iraq or Iran).

The most important thing to say, two years after October 7, is that the remaining hostages must be released right away, and that Hamas must also release the bodies of dead hostages.

Although Israel managed to get its act together and repel the invasion after its shocking failures of intelligence and readiness in the lead-up to October 7, and although Israel has had a lot of success against Hamas and its allies, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran on the battlefield, my view is that Israel has won most of the battles but lost the war. Why? Because Hamas’s strategy has been designed around maximizing civilian casualties on its own side, and most of the world has blamed Israel (I’m speaking morally now, not legally, though I’ll come to the law in a bit) for the deaths that Hamas has caused (again, speaking morally, not legally). The goal was to reduce support for the Jewish state and obtain recognition for the Palestinian state, without giving up the things Palestinians will need to give up in order eventually to have a state, mostly the fantasy of having a single Palestinian state in all of the land, or maybe two majority-Palestinian states. That is why Hamas leaders have talked about how important October 7 was to the cause of Palestinian statehood (e.g., here, here, here). In statecraft, there is no “E for effort,” and so regardless of the truth of the matter, the Israeli government’s failure to persuade the world of Hamas’s culpability, even if that meant fighting the war in a different way, is a major strategic disaster. The looming but still, I hope, avoidable loss of the American bipartisan consensus on Israel is a major strategic disaster. Now instead of figuring out how to rid the world of the scourge of Hamas and other Islamist terrorist groups, the world is focused on how to punish Israel for being the immediate instrument of the death and destruction among the people of Gaza that Hamas has willed and wrought.

But Israel has fought this PR war in the press, on campus, and in international forums under the weight of a handicap. The handicap is antisemitism.

Even before October 7, people fought about the antisemitism of the right and the antisemitism of the left. People on the left said the real problem was antisemitism on the right, and that antisemitism was not a problem, or a least not a serious problem, on the left. People on the right said the real problem was antisemitism on the left, and that antisemitism was not a problem, or a least not a serious problem, on the right. The Jews were caught in the middle.

But there is another, more telling, way to divide antisemitism into two kinds. First, there is the antisemitism of Jihad al-Shamie, the terrorist who murdered Jews at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur. I am confident that if we could ask al-Shamie for his thoughts, he would say something like, “I hate Jews,” or “Allah hates Jews,” or “Jews are evil.” I can’t make sense otherwise of his murder and mayhem spree.

But while there is plenty of outright hatred in the world aimed not just at Jews but at lots of kinds of people, and while plenty of antisemites are like al-Shamie, the greater danger are the people who would not say “I hate Jews,” or who might even say, “I love Jews,” but who nevertheless have learned through thousands of years of culture and now through a few decades of elite Western academic fads filtering out of humanities departments to read their mental maps of the world through an antisemitic lens. I am not going to try to give a catalogue, but here are some themes. And I want to start by saying that everyone educated in the Western tradition, including Jews and including me, fall victim to this. This shouldn’t be unfamiliar to us in the post-Ibrahim Kendi, post-Robin DiAngelo world. Everyone, even well-meaning people, sometimes see the world through a racist lens. Everyone, even well-meaning people, sometimes see the world through an antisemitic lens.¹This, by the way, is why I do not like the tendency among some in the organized Jewish community to “rebrand” antisemitism as “Jew hatred.”

Here is an example of how highly educated and well-meaning people apply a different standard to Jewish problems than to others’ problems. After Claudine Gay’s disastrous testimony in late 2023, when she refused to say that calling for the genocide of the Jews would violate Harvard’s policies, Professor Ben Eidelson of Harvard Law School came to her defense:

“She did nothing wrong,” he writes, and “the real failure of leadership would be surrendering to a campaign so hostile to our values.” According to Prof. Eiders, “universities are supposed to be enclaves where substance—facts, reason, even nuance—still count.”

But as I observed in a post, Professor Eidelson had just written a very interesting and nuanced article about how, in the university setting, the “etiquette of equality” means that certain discussions that engage the sensitivities of vulnerable minority groups should be off limits. I am not going to say more about the details of this: please read Prof. Eidelson’s rich paper or my post commenting on it. It is enough to say that Professor Eidelson, himself a Jew, has blinders on, like many of us, when it comes to seeing the Jews as a vulnerable minority group. Those blinders are particularly vexing in our age of increasing rhetorical, social, economic, and physical threats to Jews on campus and elsewhere.

Do lawyers do this, too, when we talk about the war? I always preface my discussions of issues like this by reminding you that I am not an expert on the law of genocide, so my view is an outsider’s view. It strikes me that what Israel is doing, even though open to criticism, cannot possibly be genocide, since Israel has a large Palestinian population that it is neither killing nor displacing; since Israel’s war in Gaza has an obvious and overwhelmingly rational military and political purpose, the protection of the Israeli state from an armed group dedicated to its destruction, and since if Israel’s purpose (genocide requires proof of purpose) were to destroy all or part of the Palestinian people as a people, it could easily do it. We heard accusations of Israeli genocide long before October 7. My view is that there is a drive in Western culture to say that the Jews, the victims of the archetypal genocide, are themselves perpetrators of genocide. The deep source of the drive is guilt about the Holocaust and the failure or refusal to prevent it. Here is how I put it in my post on the ICJ’s decision on preliminary measures in the genocide case:

There’s an aphorism attributed (apparently wrongly) to Israeli psychoanalyst Zvi Rex: “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” I think one can say that the world will never forgive the Jews for their victimization, and that phenomenon helps explain the hypocrisy and sanctimony and desire to “turn the tables” that we see today.

The well-meaning people whose conscious or subconscious way of understanding the Jews and their history is warped by antisemitism are not, of course, guilty of murder in the Manchester Yom Kippur case. But they—we—have created the social environment that makes those kinds of attacks possible, that make boycotts of Jewish businesses possible, that make social ostracism of Jews, and especially Jews who say “I am a Zionist,” possible.

The Jews’ problems are maybe not the most important problems in the world today, but they are the most important problems to the Jews, whose daily lives and basic sense of security in society have suddenly come under threat. When well-meaning folks complain that the Jews “just think about themselves,” I think, “walk a day in our shoes.” You would not put up with having your children attend schools that are perpetually locked down, with having to have armed guards and other security measures at your places of worship and community centers, with constant gaslighting and dismissal of your concerns, with “whataboutism,” and with “thoughts and prayers” in the wake of tragedies.

• 1
  This, by the way, is why I do not like the tendency among some in the organized Jewish community to “rebrand” antisemitism as “Jew hatred.”